They're going to have trouble selling that price tag to the tech savvy at least. At that kind of pricing one might as well buy enterprise grade drives.

If you get the WD RE 4Tb, it'll cost you right about 480USD. This is 4Tb for 360USD.

I don't know about tech savvy people, but math savvy people see a value here. As for worrying about loosing the data, you can spend 1400USD to have 4 of these bad boys in a Raid10 and you have 8Tb of mirrored data. Pretty good for media server for pretty cheap.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BeaverBender

WTH happened to the 5TB drives? Seagate announced back in 2011 that they were going to have 5TB drives in January of 2012 and here we are almost a year later still dealing with 4TB drives.

I know WD has 6tb externals.

As for seagate, check out this link, it's old but talks about the flooding that put back HD production until 2012. Even in the start of 2012 they didn't think they would have orders fulfilled by the end of the year.

If you get the WD RE 4Tb, it'll cost you right about 480USD. This is 4Tb for 360USD.

I don't know about tech savvy people, but math savvy people see a value here. As for worrying about loosing the data, you can spend 1400USD to have 4 of these bad boys in a Raid10 and you have 8Tb of mirrored data. Pretty good for media server for pretty cheap.

Where are you getting your numbers from? When I look, I see the WD RE 4TB for under $400 without sales (and with a sale, I've seen them for $350), not $480. Frankly, for the same price, I would rather get a Seagate Contellation ES 4TB drive... comes with 128MB cache instead of the 64MB on these WD drives.

Also, I would rather put four of these in a RAID5 than RAID10, that way you get over 10TB and still don't have to worry to much about "losing" data.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tethlah

I know WD has 6tb externals.

As for seagate, check out this link, it's old but talks about the flooding that put back HD production until 2012. Even in the start of 2012 they didn't think they would have orders fulfilled by the end of the year.

If you get the WD RE 4Tb, it'll cost you right about 480USD. This is 4Tb for 360USD.

I don't know about tech savvy people, but math savvy people see a value here. As for worrying about loosing the data, you can spend 1400USD to have 4 of these bad boys in a Raid10 and you have 8Tb of mirrored data. Pretty good for media server for pretty cheap.

I wouldn't call that cheap.. I'd rather spend half that for 2TB drives.

Where are you getting your numbers from? When I look, I see the WD RE 4TB for under $400 without sales (and with a sale, I've seen them for $350), not $480. Frankly, for the same price, I would rather get a Seagate Contellation ES 4TB drive... comes with 128MB cache instead of the 64MB on these WD drives.

Also, I would rather put four of these in a RAID5 than RAID10, that way you get over 10TB and still don't have to worry to much about "losing" data.

The 6TB externals are actually two 3GB drives stuck together.

I got my numbers from Newegg. And for the Raid, it's up to you how much fault tolerance you are willing to accept. I have 4Tb of movies, music, and shows, along with client data and finances, I have 0 tolerance for possible data loss. I Raid10 my SAN, and I keep backups of everything. But that's me, what you can tolerate is what makes you decide what to do with your drives.

Where do you see the RE 4Tb for under 400? Just curious, is it Canada or US? I'm in Nashville so prices in Canada usually don't apply to me (That's why I specify USD rather that CAD in my pricing)

Quote:

Originally Posted by supaflyx3

I wouldn't call that cheap.. I'd rather spend half that for 2TB drives.

Well, If you buy down here where I'm buying, to get 16Tb of 2Tb drives costs 1432USD. To buy 16Tb of 4Tb drives costs 1356USD, with half the points of failure.

For Caviar Blacks at least the math works out to the 4TB being less than 2x2TB (Newegg regular price vs that announced MSRP), not including port multiplier or add-on SATA card and such - it remains to be seen how well the new drive would perform, but looking at the RE version, a 4TB black should easily outdo a 2TB in sequential tasks just due to areal density.

That said, who is the target audience of this particular drive? From what I'm seeing, it's just workstation users.
Gamers are better served by a SSD+smaller hard drive combo (unless they exceed 2TB of games somehow). People hogging media would be better off getting a RAID array of 2TB drives or waiting for the less expensive 4TB "Blue" or "Red" since playing a movie isn't close to saturating even the slowest >1TB drives.

__________________"The computer programmer says they should drive the car around the block and see if the tire fixes itself." [src]